Hingham Resident Named MGB Chief Development Officer

March 18, 2022 By Carol Britton Meyer

In his new role as chief development officer for Mass General Brigham -- one of the world's leading health care systems -- Hingham resident Chris O'Connor will work side-by-side with development leaders at each of MGB's member organizations to support through significant fundraising initiatives the important work of its 12 development offices.

O'Connor explained that "development" is another word for philanthropy or fundraising. "As big as MGB is, it's a nonprofit health care system, and all the hospitals that fall under it raise philanthropic revenue to support their mission and advance their vision for the future. As MGB's CDO, I will oversee all the fundraising for the entire health system, with the goal of helping to raise hundreds of millions of dollars overall. It’s a big challenge, but one that I feel I’m ready for at this stage of my career."

MGB offers an integrated system which includes academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

MGB is committed to serving the community through enhanced patient- and family-centered, accessible, and equitable care, teaching and research, and in taking a leadership role as an integrated health care system.

MGB approached O'Connor as part of a search for their top development job, resulting in multiple rounds of interviews. "It was my good fortune to be offered the job," he told the Hingham Anchor. "I loved my work at South Shore Health and what it does for the community in which we live, but while it was a tough decision, at the end of the day I couldn't pass up one of the most significant development jobs in the country."

Prior to joining MGB from South Shore Health, O'Connor had oversight for all the fundraising activities for the South Shore Health Foundation, including the launching of a $70 million capital campaign that is nearing completion -- the largest in SSH's history.

His solicitation efforts over nine years also resulted in most of the largest individual gifts in the history of that health care system.

Prior to his time with SSH, O'Connor was president of the Cape Cod Healthcare Foundation, where he was responsible for leading a team that successfully completed a $100 milion capital campaign.

O'Connor spent 15 years in his first job with Ghiorsi & Sorrenti, a national consulting firm, serving as senior vice president and managing director. In that role, he acted as counsel in the capital major gifts, campaign and strategic planning, and capacity assessment arena for more than 80 hospitals, systems, and other health care organizations across the country.

"I was fortunate that my first job focused on capital campaigns, which means working with the largest gifts an organization historically receives,“ O’Connor said.  "This means that my baseline training from the start of my career was working on strategies to secure large philanthropic gifts, which is not where most people begin in this field. Instead they start with smaller gifts involving online giving, direct-mail campaigns, or special events and progress from there up to the major and transformational giving level, while by happenstance I started at the opposite end of the giving pyramid," O'Connor said.

While he attributes some of his success to luck, he said his natural curiosity and interest in the people he meets in general and their success stories are an important component of his fundraising efforts.

"These individuals have done well in their varied careers and have built their net worth in a variety of ways — it could be someone from the financial world or in real estate. But I’ve met people who have done well in some fields many never come across. For example, I recall working with a highly successful pig farmer at a client in New Hampshire. He was very generous to his local community hospital,"  O'Connor said. “I enjoy building relationships with people from all different backgrounds, and this can lead to [generous donations]."

O'Connor said that his past experience, "without question," provided him with the solid foundation "for what I will be doing now with MGB. In the beginning, my job will involve a lot of listening, learning, and gaining an understanding of the complexities of this really large, extraordinarily-successful health care system." MGB is the largest employer in Massachusetts, with nearly 80,000 employees statewide.

When asked how he choose this career path, O'Connor explained that "nobody grows up wanting to be a fundraiser. Lots of people want to be in finance, doctors, lawyers, or professional hockey players, while most of us in the development field fell into it by accident. That was certainly the case for me."

While philanthropy and development are viewed as fundraising efforts, "it's all about developing relationships over a long period of time that can lead to extraordinarily generous donations that can change the health care industry with advances on a local and even global scale," O'Connor said.

What he's most looking forward to when he begins his new job on April 4 is the experience of getting to know and working with so many different development leaders at the different locations. "No two development offices are the same. Each has its own set of challenges and how it fits in with the entity it supports, so each day will be different,”O’Connor said.

His goal is maximizing the results of each fundraising campaign to help further the mission and vision of MGB's organizations.

One of O'Connor's overall biggest accomplishments so far in his career has been "delivering historical results" whether working for an organization or consulting firm. "This helps them to achieve their goals and sometimes accomplishes things that they could only have dreamed of doing otherwise," he said.

Examples of these include major campaigns that have fueled the enormous growth at South Shore Health and South Shore Hospital over the past two decades. Those advances include a maternity department and birthing unit at South Shore Hospital in the late 1990s; the cancer center completed in 2008; the orthopedic center located on Derby Street in Hingham; The Grayken Center for Treatment serving those with substance use disorders and behavioral health challenges, and the critical care unit which opened in 2017. "Who could have known that we were headed for a global pandemic and that this unit (the new state-of-the-art CCU) would be on the frontline two years ago in the fight against COVID?" O'Connor said. "Lives were saved, and most of the funds to build the new CCU came from the generosity of the South Shore community, with the largest gift to this project being $5 million from Alan McKim and his family foundation."

After completing a successful major campaign, O'Connor feels a deep sense of satisfaction knowing that the dollars raised "go toward helping an entire community -- usually people I will likely never meet -- including the thousands of patients who annually seek care at all of our Massachusetts hospitals collectively. It's a very powerful accomplishment."

O'Connor and his wife, Juliet, moved to Hingham in 1997, where they have raised their children -- Jack, Will, Matt, and Libby. What he likes best about the town are the community pride expressed by its residents and its overall beauty, support for athletic teams, as well as drama and the arts, and the school system.

"It's a wonderful place to live and to raise a family," he said. "What first caught our attention when we were looking for a house was the downtown area."

Their spare time involves "anything related to our kids' activities. None of them have the same interests, which makes our spare time interesting to say the least." O'Connor said.

When he and his wife moved to Hingham, they didn't realize that Juliet's family on her mother's side are distant relatives of the well-known Cushing and Lincoln families, which she discovered through research. "Perhaps we were destined to live here. . . ,” he quipped.